I actually agree with this presentation. Why do you think I chose to make this site a blog?

UnixCommerce Blog

Here’s what some computer security professionals from Black Hat 2008 had to say about black hat money makers online.

As I constantly read what people have to say about black hat SEO, I came across this definition in Wikipedia:

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines’ algorithms, or by a manual site review.

One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices. Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google’s list.

What I found interesting is that this definition gives two examples of black hat SEO that are really really outdated. Cloaking by user-agent and keyword masking are a couple of the “oldest tricks in the book” so to speak, and are a couple of tactics that the search engines are now equipped to spot easily and penalize quickly.

If we want a more up-to-date explanation of Black Hat SEO from wikipedia, we have to look up what is being labeled “spamdexing”. This includes much better information such as doorway pages, hidden links, link farms, etc. I recommend the spamdexing page of Wikipedia as a reference to get a base for more Black Hat SEO techniques, since many of those STILL WORK!!!

I saw these vids that were just added to YouTube. This dude talks about black hat SEO strategies. It’s basically a lot of bitching, throwing in stuff like “it’s not fair” and “it hurts people” which isn’t true. Black Hat SEO is abosultely fair, anybody can do it. Black Hat SEO doesn’t hurt anybody, I’ve never seen a black hat website that reaches through your computer screen and stabs you. This isn’t “great content” like they’ve called it.

I don’t think this presenter has actually DONE any of these tactics and has never EXPERIENCED any of the penalties he claims you’ll get. This is just propogating more myths, fears, and unbased claims about black hat SEO strategies. This is a way to try to pitch their site I guess, but it’s just another example of preying on newbies, at least in my opinion.

Even if these claims were legitimate, they just say what they are. They don’t show exactly what people can do that can supposedly get them penalized. Why is that? Probably because they don’t even know how to do what they’re saying NOT to do.

Joe Tierney’s tools are probably my favorites. I mean seriously, the guy updates his stuff and pays attention to support, and most importantly, the tools actually work. They get real results.

The only tool I missed out on was the TrackBack Generator. I was away when it launched and it sold out in a little over 2 hours. You can imagine I was upset when I came home only to see the program was no longer for sale. I made sure that didn’t happen again when the BlogFarm Generator was released, which Joe also just recently updated. That one is also sold out, but I fortunately got my copy. For some reason that one didn’t sell out nearly as fast even though it’s a stronger tool, at least in my opinion.

I posted a detailed review of Blogger Generator, the tool that is still available publicly, here:
http://www.blackhatseoreview.com/review/blogger-generator-review/

Blogger has been deleting a lot of blogs lately, so the recent update of Blogger Generator includes new templates to reduce the footprints that users leave. Recently there was a bug in Google’s captchas as well, but as I’ve been testing this morning, it appears to have been resolved and is only asking for one correct captcha. The last few days it was asking for 3-4 and that was really frustrating.

But things are back to normal. There may be an update to the Article Grabber program since the source for that program has made some changes that have made it dysfunctional for the moment. At least now most blogger blogs don’t default to NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW. The default blogger template that comes with Blogger Generator is set to INDEX/FOLLOW which is what’s most important for how I use Blogger Generator: getting keyword links.

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